August 27, 2006

At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose
dispatches with The Question — the five words that inevitably confront
writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even
nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”

Prose’s succinct answer is
“no,” but she elaborates on it with characteristic humor, asking us to
imagine “Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him
that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up
one morning to find he’s a giant bug.” Repelled by that sort of
poisonous atmosphere, I used to inveigh against writing workshops —
right up until the day I started teaching one. Now, like many of my
colleagues, I find myself wondering just how much success I (and my
students) can reasonably expect.

Useful teaching texts are few.
For all the wisdom in John Gardner’s “Art of Fiction,” his sallies
against 1970’s experimentalism are aging poorly, and undergrads seem to
dislike his curmudgeonly tone.

E.M. Forster’s “Aspects of the
Novel” is likewise yellowing at the edges. Classic reference books like
Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” and William K. Zinsser’s “On
Writing Well” are thorough sources for writers of both fiction and
nonfiction, but their focus on grammar and other supposedly arcane
topics makes them slow going. (Maira Kalman’s illustrations for the new
edition of “The Elements of Style” at least illuminate the Strunkian
demands with quirky panache.) Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” and Stephen King’s “On Writing” are heartening, but perhaps because they’re so personal, the advice to be gleaned from them is scattershot.

Another
difficulty faced by writing teachers is, paradoxically, the lack of
interest many students show in reading. And those who do read often
lack the training to observe subtle writerly clues. There’s a real
need, then, for “Reading Like a Writer” — a primer both for aspiring
writers and for readers who’d like to increase their sensitivity to the
elements of the writer’s craft.

Prose notes that the
creative-writing workshop (which she brilliantly satirized in her novel
“Blue Angel”) is a latecomer to literary culture, but that writers have
always turned to their predecessors for inspiration: “They studied
meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with
Aristophanes.” In other words, it helps to read the masters: “You can
assume that if a writer’s work has survived for centuries, there are
reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a
conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead
white males.”

Prose also recommends savoring books rather than
racing through them, a strategy that “may require some rewiring,
unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an
opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal
lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”

Delight?
As a student, I rarely heard the word mentioned, although, like Prose,
I became a writer because books gave me such joy. Her insistence on
that pleasure informs her method: reading carefully to see what an
author does on the page and between the lines. This casts learning in a
positive light, unlike the typical workshop’s E.R. approach of trying
to diagnose and cure the ailments of a story.

Prose’s chapters
focus on potentially challenging topics: dialogue, narration, even
where to take paragraph breaks. (I wish she’d included one on getting
characters in and out of rooms.) In each chapter, she quotes from
authors who approach the subject in interesting ways. Writing about
sentences, for example, she cites Rebecca West, Samuel Johnson, Philip Roth
and Virginia Woolf, and then patiently explains why. Here, for example,
from the chapter called “Words,” is her take on a passage from Paul
Bowles’s story “A Distant Episode”:

“The contents of the
Professor’s ‘two small overnight bags full of maps, sun lotions and
medicines’ provide a tiny mini-course in the importance of close
reading. The protagonist’s anxiety and cautiousness, his whole
psychological makeup, has been communicated in five words (‘maps, sun
lotions and medicines’) and without the need to use one descriptive
adjective or phrase. (He was an anxious man, who worried about getting
lost or sunburned or sick and so forth.) What very different
conclusions we might form about a man who carries a bag filled with
dice, syringes and a handgun.”

Despite her book’s didactic
purpose, Prose distrusts hard-and-fast rules. When she recalls advising
students to stick to one point of view, or to avoid assigning two
characters similar names, she remembers finding counterexamples in
Chekhov. Her notions of good writing are elastic and open-minded: a
liberal view rooted in a belief in the importance of reading. “The
advantage of reading widely,” she notes, “as opposed to trying to
formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no
general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a
direction in which you might want to go.”

No reader will revere
all the writers Prose finds great, and some may carp at her list of 117
“Books to Be Read Immediately.” But “Reading Like a Writer” is
sufficiently capacious — and encouraging — to allow for such
differences of opinion. As her subtitle promises, Prose’s little guide
will motivate “people who love books” and “those who want to write
them” to be sensitive readers of their own and others’ work. And it
will inspire them to practice the skills she teaches when reading books
like “Middlemarch” and “Sense and Sensibility,” two of the many her
exegesis made me hungry to reread.

I don’t know if any book about
writing can tell us where novels come from — or how they take shape in
a writer’s mind. Nevertheless, “Reading Like a Writer” should be
greatly appreciated in and out of the classroom. Like the great works
of fiction, it’s a wise and voluble companion.